Schooled in Murder (2 page)

The current buzzwords were “best practice.” There were always new buzzwords. “Best practice” meant that in your classroom you always used what the research showed to be the best way to get your children to learn.

This is news?

Another big problem was that what the research said was the most effective methodology kept changing. The upshot was that every few years some idiot reinvented the educational wheel. The bizarre shape of this twisted metaphorical sphere often depended on the political orientation of the researcher. Making other people jump through hoops can be so satisfying for the Nazi wannabes.

Today’s fracas was over who was going to go to the latest trend-setting seminar. It was going to be a full week in San Francisco paid for by the school district.

Petty debates about silly privileges among those who educate the children in this world? You better believe it. Then again, if it had been just a Saturday in Kankakee, maybe they wouldn’t be hauling out their verbal bazookas.

There were those in the battling factions who counted the number of times who got to go to which conference and calculated how far away from home the trip was. There were those who didn’t want to leave their classroom for the slightest
bit of time, figuring it was too much of a hassle to come back after a substitute teacher screwed up their lesson plans. Others assumed they were too valuable to the children in their classes for students to do without them as a teacher. A few radicals thought they’d been hired to teach and would prefer to do that rather than trot about the countryside ingesting information that a reasonably intelligent person could pick up in the latest educational or teachers’ union journals. I was in this last group.

Today, Carl Pinyon, one of the young rebels, actually produced copies of a chart that showed who had gone to which conferences over the past thirty years. Demands to know how he got the information and from whom escalated into accusations bordering on hysteria.

Boring diatribes alternated with shouts, yells, and banging fists.

I graded papers.

It irritated some on both sides that I usually did this throughout the warfare. Today I pondered for quite some time what to do about Fred Zileski. Poor Fred was a senior. He was a little shaky on capital letters at the beginning of sentences and had yet to be convinced that something, assumedly punctuation, was needed at the end of each set of words he put down. One hesitated to label as sentences the bits of prose that escaped from his pencil. They were, in Fred’s own unique way, his attempts to express himself. He was a big kid, a football player, kind of quiet usually. I’d been trying for over a month to figure out any practice, much less a “best practice,” that would convince Fred to give capitalization and punctuation a try. No luck yet. I figured if we got past those first two hurdles, we’d work on making sure a verb had something to do with his sentences. I’d already surrendered the spelling battle. All computers came with spell checks these days.

Complicating Fred’s problems was his parents’ continued hostility seven years after their divorce had become final. His mother was currently president of our school board. Because of her, Fred had been placed in honors classes for more than half of his elementary schooling. She’d become president of the board to ensure his being in such programs. To say Fred hadn’t gotten the help he needed is grossly unfair to understatements. As far as I could tell, in any school district, the criteria for being in the honors program were aligned to one basic standard. The cutoff line was wherever it was necessary for school board members’ kids to get into the program. A travesty? Yep. And it happens far more often than rational people would imagine. And Fred was paying the price. Kids are always the ones who pay the price when adults’ egos get skewed.

When I looked up from straining to read Fred’s writing, Jourdan Chase was on his feet. He was bellowing at someone I couldn’t see. “You’re the one who doesn’t have respect for his colleagues. You’re the one who’s been sucking up so fast since you’ve been here that a vacuum’s been created on the third floor. We can barely remain upright for the gale of wind blowing through as you rush about trying to undercut and backstab the rest of us.” Jourdan had been with the department since the advent of the printing press. Most of the time he was an annoying dope. Except when he took on the suckups in the department. At those moments a lot of us would have voted for him for sainthood.

In moments the object of his attack stood up. Gracie Eberson pointed her finger at Jourdan and screamed back, “You’re the one keeping this department from moving forward. You’re the one who says no to everything before the explanations are even finished. I watch you shaking your head ´no’ at any new idea.” In her early twenties, Eberson affected billowy granny dresses on her sixties-hippie frame.

Her hair hung in cascading auburn ringlets down to her waist. She wore rhinestone-studded pink-rimmed glasses. She often attempted to drape herself in a veil of Earth Mother serenity, very much absent from this afternoon’s response. The other problem with her usual persona was that her voice normally sounded like something between a shrill mouse squeak and a bandsaw about to break.

They both stood as they traded accusations. This was a bit different. Usually everybody conducted their assaults while firmly planted on their butts. Jourdan and Gracie were on opposite sides of the room. Their voices continued on high rant. Others began trying to shout over them. A few tried to get them to calm down. Others sat back in horror. A few in the back snickered. Gracie smacked her rolled-up grade book on the top of a computer monitor. Jourdan banged his fist on the countertop of the circulation desk. Moments later, it crashed into shards and splinters. Then Gracie swung her arm around and dislodged the monitor, which lurched six inches to her left. A second later, it plunged to the floor. The loud banging and smashing called a halt to all other noise. Then Jourdan stormed out the exit nearest him, and Gracie the one closest to her. Each slammed the respective doors through which they stormed.

Only a demented and bored English teacher would refer to them as storm doors. I confess to neither.

An utterly satisfying silence ensued for three seconds. Then the remaining combatants started again.

My friend, Meg Swarthmore, the aged and beloved librarian, would be pissed about the destruction. She always left immediately after school on faculty-meeting days. Today I’d urged her to stay and watch the fun. She’d peered at me over her reading glasses and said, “Perhaps, Tom Mason, you and I have a different definition of fun.” She told me once that, sickeningly amusing as she thought it might be to keep score
and see the budding of burgeoning gossip, she preferred to miss the pervasive hostility. I’d fill her in over our usual Friday-morning breakfast tomorrow.

I toughed it out at the meeting for as long as I could. After another half an hour, I left my stack of papers and eased out the back. Slowly, no need to rush. The battling educators and ungraded papers would be waiting for me when I got back.

I sauntered into the departmental office and ran off a test. Figuring a few more side trips wouldn’t hurt, I stopped in the washroom. Then I made a parent call I’d been putting off all day. I used my cell phone and called from the foyer near one of the school’s side doors. It was quiet, and I could watch the rain as the sky darkened. The call was to Mrs. Faherty, another board member. Her kid, Spike, was in my classes and came for after-school tutoring, as did Fred Zileski. Mrs. Faherty had only recently been appointed to the board to fill a vacancy. I’d never heard of her saying a word at a board meeting. She had a delightfully realistic view of her juvenile delinquent. She and her husband attended every conference with her kid, and they had for years. The kid was passionate about his motorcycle and little else. The machine was one of the few holds she had over him. I called her once a week to update her on Spike’s progress. This week he’d completed an entire essay. Unlike Fred, Spike was quite bright, something that Spike did not want teachers to be aware of.

After I hung up, I realized I’d been gone nearly half an hour. I decided to forego a stop in the departmental storeroom on the third floor near my classroom. I did need masking tape and copy paper, but even I didn’t have the nerve to be gone this long. Such an extended absence as mine would cause comment.

I eased back to the library to find only two people present,
two custodians cleaning up the mess Jourdan and Gracie had made. The meeting had ended five minutes after I’d left. I’d missed the end. I decided not to weep.

I picked up my papers, then climbed back to the third floor and headed for the storeroom. It was a former teachers’ office. Those had long since gone the way of good intentions. Any number of nooks, crannies, hallways, classrooms, and offices had been closed in recent years for the numerous patches, temporary fixes, or reconstructions the building needed. Five school referendums in a row had failed to pass in our district. The community had said no to taxes. The result was their kids attended a school that had been falling apart when they tried to pass the first referendum twenty years ago. Now the rapidly deteriorating building gave decrepit a bad name.

One minor example of what needed to be fixed was the door to the supply room. It could easily have been used to create sound effects for any number of Hollywood horror movies. Purchasing a can of WD-40 might require the passage of a referendum and the replacement of the entire custodial staff.

As I walked into the supply room, I flipped on the light. Two men standing near a broken copier jumped apart. I’d seen enough to know that they’d been attempting to jam their tongues down each others’ throats while their hands were on the front of each others’ pants.

One was a young member of the English department, Brandon Benson. The other was a youthful gym teacher named Steven Frecking. The choice of venue was odd. Not quite as odd as the fact that Benson was currently married to a woman. Benson was five-feet-seven with black hair cut short. His blue jeans said size twenty-eight on the patch on the back. He wore a white shirt, now half untucked, a blue tie now askew, and a blue blazer half off his left shoulder. Frecking
was over six-feet-two with narrow hips and broad shoulders. He had played quarterback for his small Wisconsin college. He wore a pair of gym shorts that were only slightly looser and covered only a bit more than a pair of knit boxer briefs. His baggy T-shirt wasn’t long enough to conceal either how far down the shorts now were or how enthused he was about the activity they’d been engaged in as I entered.

I turned to leave and then stopped. In a far corner I saw a designer shower-clog and a foot. I pointed to it. “Who is that?” I asked.

2

They stopped rearranging their clothes and looked behind them. I rushed forward. I figured someone might have passed out. The two of them remained motionless. I shoved several boxes aside.

Gracie Eberson lay on the floor. Someone had crammed one of those oversized chalkboard erasers into her mouth. She wasn’t breathing. I yanked the eraser out. No change. I felt for a pulse. Nothing. I pulled out my cell phone.

I felt a hand on my arm. It was Benson. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked.

“She’s not breathing,” I said. “I think she’s dead. I’m calling 911.” I’d been in the Marines. I’d seen death up close. That didn’t make it easier to deal with, but I knew enough not to panic. At the moment, I had a rush of something to do.

Benson tapped my arm. “You can’t,” he said.

I looked at him, my thumb poised over the keypad.

“Nobody can know we were here,” he said.

I said, “This is an emergency.” I punched numbers and reported where I was and what the situation was. After I hung up, I called the school’s main office rather than hunt
for a call button in the nearest classroom. I got the answering machine. It was late. The secretaries must have left for the day.

Still kneeling, I noticed bruising on Gracie’s face, mottled with bits of chalk dust and lint. I looked up at the two men. I saw a small patch of wetness on the front of Benson’s jeans. Catching my glance, he quickly held a book over his crotch. His face was beet red. Frecking had a gym bag in front of his midsection.